Biography
Sr. Joan Chittister is Executive Director of Benetvision in Erie, Pennsylvania, a national resource center for contemporary spirituality. Sr. Joan is a social psychologist, a renowned international speaker, and a widely published author. Her book, Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men, was named one of several "books of the year" by Sojourners magazine. Her most recent books are The Story of Ruth and The Illuminated Life. Sr. Joan is widely recognized for her work for justice, peace, and equality for women in the church and society. She is an engaging and dynamic speaker whose lectures are popular around the world. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"The Millennium:  Who Cares?" 
"If we stay on the road we are on," the Chinese say, "We shall surely get where we are going."

Unfortunately, the insight may be escaping us. At the moment of millennium we are reviewing where we have been with a passion. But we seem to be making very little connection between the past millennium and the new one. Almost two-thirds of the people surveyed saw this New Year's Eve as no different than all their many New Year's Eves before it. And the truth is that there is no tangible, no scientific answer to the question of why a millennium matters to anyone. Most respondents to public polls consider a millennium "an historical occasion," at best, and definitely not "a religious" one.

At one level, that is certainly true. Religions in general do not attach any special doctrinal significance to it. And yet, the question of the meaning of a millennium is certainly more feeling than fact, more a spiritual one than it is an historical one.

The world did not end, social structures did not collapse, the nature of life suffered no stunning revision just because the calendar turned on this particular year. And there are, after all, civilizations--Korea, Egypt, China, India, for instance--that are far older than our own. The fact is that the new millennium is not really about time at all. The millennium is about the very meaning of meaning itself. We are about to begin another thousand years of Western civilization. But how? The Chinese proverb is clearly correct: a world devoid of reflection, of thoughtful examination, of sincere self-criticism, in other words, is doomed.

Millenniums provide the spiritual mountain top from which we may chart not just how far we've come, but also how far we have yet to go to be what we truly want to be. What we value as a people is enshrined in the past. Millenniums are a collective examination of conscience that invite us to review that past, to renew our best energies, to repent our public sins, to grow up spiritually.

The view from the mountaintop called millennium 2000 is a troubling one. Two deeply etched lines cross and crisscross its human story again and again. One line shows a commitment to human development; the other an addiction to human brutality. On the one hand, schism, Crusades, division and inquisition sullied the witness of the churches in the past millennium while slavery, colonialism, wars of conquest and holocaust shadowed the development of national states. And yet it is also true that the last thousand years saw a series of landmark moments that enhanced the rights and dignity of individuals and the credibility of its institutions:

Reformation, scientific discoveries, civil rights, the Industrial Revolution, the Woman's Movement with its concentration on the development of the other half of the human race, and the advent of global communication changed the world for all of us. It was a millennium like no other: global in vision, frantic in pace, mind-numbing in the scope of its creativity, ravaging in its destructive power and--standing now on the edge of space--fraught with possibility. And what have we learned from the last thousand years? We have learned that dictators can be elected despite the most democratic of processes, that weapons neither defend nor deter human barbarity, that war is obsolete, that science is not God, that poverty is a political policy, not a condition of life, that patriarchy is insufficient to the psyche of either women or men, and that it is not what we have that makes for the good life, it is the kind of people we become in the midst of it that counts.

"This time, like all times," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."

The answer to the tensions of humankind does not come from history. As the proverb teaches:

"Time changes nothing; people do."

The political, spiritual, economic and cultural choices I myself make from day to day are the stuff of the new millennium. It is not the achievements of the past that a millennium appraises; it is the quality of our aspirations for the future that are in question now. The ideals of the 20th century are clear: it brought the highest standard of living for the greatest number of people that the world has ever known. It brought a new thirst for democracy. It brought unparalleled advances in medicine. And it brought a space age that started out sure that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe and ended up knowing that there are at least 40 billion other galaxies out there besides ours.

But those same values--wealth, progress, individualism, control, and superiority--also brought the Great Depression, two world wars, nuclearism, social violence on a grand scale, globalism, and a computer that defeated a world chess champion at his own game. The spiritual dilemma looms large: in the face of a world that has never been both more rich and more poor, more educated and more illiterate, more healthy and more sick than it is today, we struggle now for spirit not for "progress." Progress we have had aplenty. What we need at this moment in time is the spiritual will to control its fury. We are deciding now whether or not people or things are more important to us; whether science will suffocate the virtue of feeling; whether technology will overrun humanity.

The hope for the new century does not lie in the laboratories of the world. Our hope rests in what lies in the human heart. In a world where starvation and contaminated water are a child's greatest enemy, we need divine compassion. In a world where corporations make $2.15 for every $1.00 they spend on wages and where more and more workers have no benefits at all, we need a sense of divine justice. In a world where women are routinely denied human rights and the wanton abortion of female fetuses is a given in many parts of the world, it is a sense of the divine creation of us all that we really need. When three people in this world have personal bank accounts equal to the gross national product of the poorest 43 nations on earth, on what shall we rest our hope? When we refuse to sign nuclear non-proliferation treaties with 152 countries of the world and spend more money on destruction than we do on human development, for what can we hope? In a country that refuses to sell beer to minors but balks at passing gun control laws that make assault weapons equally unaccessible to children, how can we find reason to hope? And yet the truth is that there are lights on the horizon of hope that give us a new way back to humanity at its best.

ABC's open-ended poll of peoples' hopes for the 21st century found that up to a third of the population said in response to an open-ended question, not a forced-choice format, that what they want for the new century is world peace, human harmony, universal medical care, religious tolerance and the end of racism. Not more money. Not more weapons. Not human domination of any ilk. Here at the dawn of the millennium stands a small but clear group of people who want change. Real change.

The findings are deeply significant: "Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world," the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote. "Indeed, that is all that ever has." The millennial question for each of us, then, is a simple one: with which group of people do we stand? Change starts in the human heart and it is the human heart, yours and mine, that is in question at the start of this millennium.

We had great parties to celebrate the passing of the past. But maybe what we really need are people who look back over this great passage of time thoughtfully and decide to live differently now. Then the values of the new millennium will be different than the values of the last one, which knew more poverty, claimed more lives, enslaved more people and monopolized more wealth than any time before it. Then maybe we will all become more human, human beings. That is the spiritual task with which a millennium--useless for any other historical, scientific, natural or religious reason--confronts us. Otherwise, as the Chinese proverb points out, we shall surely get where we are going.

Interview with Joan Chittister
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Joan, a compelling message on the new millennium, and a jubilee of justice for you.

Joan Chittister: Absolutely.

Talbot: You talk about growing up spiritually. How is that possible for those who may be people of faith but who are much more interested in the effect of Y2K on their investment portfolios?

Chittister: Well, you know, some of this has to do with the way we present the spiritual life to begin with. I believe very strongly that the function of the spiritual life is not to create some sort of spiritual Jaccuzi for us. When religion and spirituality become the feel-good activity of the week, which is not to say that developing a relationship with the spiritual life doesn't feel good, but the function of religion is to bind together heaven and earth, to bring to life among us that call that God gives us to full humanity. You have a very immature spirituality, in other words, when you see spirituality as simply applied to me. I go to church every week. Why didn't I get the promotion? I've always prayed with my kids at night.

How could one of them possibly have gone wrong? God is bigger than that. My spiritual life must be bigger than that, meaning that I'm here on earth to leave this earth better than when I came into it. There is a theology of co-creation. God didn't finish the world. God made you to help finish the world so spirituality maturity comes. I grow up spiritually when I see myself as having a wider spiritual obligation than simply to treat God as a vending machine that makes my life comfortable.

Talbot: And that growing up spiritually has to do with a change in the human heart. Joan, I think of your book Heart of Flesh. What a wonderful title! Can you say something about that metaphor for Heart of Flesh as it relates to this millennial understanding?

Chittister: Oh, certainly I can. It's a wonderful image from scripture. "I will take out of you your stony hearts and give you hearts of flesh." We have hard hearts when the only thing we care about is the standard of living in the United States. We have hard hearts when we can see the number of uninsured children in this country rise from 33 million in 1992 to 44 million this morning, and not recognize that that's a major social issue for us. A heart of flesh is a heart that feels, that senses, that knows, that relates. Until we begin to see ourselves not just as American citizens, not just as Baptists or Catholics or Lutherans or Methodists, but as children of God and citizens of a human community, we have hard hearts because we are keeping part of the world out of them.

Talbot: If the millennium is only meaningful through a spiritual lens, Joan, what can you say to people whose hearts are hurting, whose hearts are wounded as they look to the future?

Chittister: Well, we have to give those people reason to hope. The only thing that we can say to those people is, "Look at me and if you don't see me doing something, every day, every year that can reduce the hurting heart of the human race, then you must confront me on it."

Talbot: You're writing a couple of new books.

Chittister: I am.

Talbot: The Life of Ruth and The Illuminated Life. Tell us about Ruth.

Chittister: Well, I'm looking at Ruth through a woman's eyes, asking what moments in my own life are being echoed in the Book of Ruth and how. What is the scripture saying to me about a woman's life when it presents an entire woman's book? In The Illuminated Life: Monastic Insights for Seekers of Wisdom, I am really looking at an A, B, C approach to the spiritual life: "A" is for awareness, "B" is for beauty, "C" is for community. I am asking what are the building blocks of the spiritual life that take place down in the neighborhood. Nothing is exalted except Creation.

Talbot: Joan, as you look from your own spiritual mountain top, as you point out, to this next millennium, what do you see personally?

Chittister: There is no doubt that the bio-technical questions of this next generation are major. When we look at an entire universe to be explored, we must recognize that every question and every answer we have had is now up for review, and we must take our best selves to those questions or the answers will be deadly.

Talbot: And we are not alone in this universe, are we?

Chittister: Well, I find it hard to believe statistically.

Talbot: Thank you so much, Sr. Joan Chittister. A joy to have you here.

Chittister: I love being here, Lydia.